Asch study

• Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.
• Asch (1951) devised what is now regarded as a classic experiment in social psychology, whereby there was an obvious answer to a line judgment task.
• If the participant gave an incorrect answer it would be clear that this was due to group pressure.
• Asch used a lab experiment to study conformity, whereby 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participated in a vision test.
• In Asch's study, there were seven confederates/stooges in the room, each with a different answer to the line judgment task.
• The real participant in Asch's study sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last.
• There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12 trials, called the critical trials.
• Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the majority view.
• On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in Asch's situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials.
• Over the 12 critical trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never conformed.
• In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of participants gave the wrong answer.
• Asch's study found that people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).
• Asch's study used a biased sample, with all participants being male students who all belonged to the same age group.
• The study lacks population validity and the results cannot be generalized to females or older groups of people.
• Asch's experiment used an artificial task to measure conformity - judging line lengths.
• The study has low ecological validity and the results cannot be generalized to other real-life situations of conformity.
• Asch replied that he wanted to investigate a situation where the participants could be in no doubt what the correct answer was.
• The high levels of conformity found by Asch were a reflection of American, 1950's culture and told us more about the historical and cultural climate of the USA in the 1950s than they do about the phenomena of conformity.
• Asch's study raised ethical issues, as participants were not protected from psychological stress which may occur if they disagreed with the majority.
• Evidence that participants in Asch-type situations are highly emotional was obtained by Back et al. (1963) who found that participants in the Asch situation had greatly increased levels of autonomic arousal.
• Asch also deceived the student volunteers claiming they were taking part in a 'vision' test; the real purpose was to see how the 'naive' participant would react to the behavior of the confederates.
• Deception was necessary to produce valid results in Asch's study.